Word: sunni
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...explosive vest, loaded with ball bearings for maximum devastation. The blast killed two U.S. service members and more than 70 Iraqi police recruits--but it also turned out to be a deadly miscalculation by the jihadis and their leader, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Most of the victims were local Sunnis, and they were joining the police force under the protection of tribal chieftains who, with the U.S. military's approval, are trying to impose order over their violent swath of Iraq. After the Jan. 5 blast, according to insurgents, tribal chiefs in Ramadi notified al-Qaeda that they were withdrawing...
...Cracks in al-Qaeda's alliance with the Iraqi groups became more pronounced after the Dec. 15 election. Al-Zarqawi saw the poll as a detour from his goal of turning Iraq into a base from which al-Qaeda could spread terrorism throughout the Middle East and Europe. Many Sunni resistance groups have a narrower focus: ridding Iraq of all occupation forces--U.S. troops and the pro-Iranian militias that slipped across the border. Sunni politicians managed to convince some key rebel groups that unless the Sunni minority voted, the elections would enhance the power of Kurdish and religious...
Since then, the fissures between the nationalists and al-Zarqawi have widened. U.S. political and military officers persuaded some Sunni tribal chiefs to send their youths into the security forces to ensure that Sunnis-not Shi'ite outsiders-would command their cities' police. But in recent meetings with various insurgent groups, says a nationalist field commander near Ramadi, al-Zarqawi's lieutenants made it clear that any Iraqi who joined the security forces was considered the enemy, thus drawing a battle line between the jihadis and their former comrades. In Latifiya, outside Baghdad, al-Zarqawi's fighters pressed Sunnis...
...their ideas are formed from an honest and heartfelt conviction that democracy is the best path towards the future. Because of this Pentagon program, their fellow citizens now have an additional reason to believe that moderate and democratic ideas are foreign-funded rather than organically grown. Likewise, if moderate Sunni clerics are perceived as being agents of the occupation, Iraqis will have all the more reason to trust the radicals...
...went downhill from there, to the point where the British are just as unwelcome in the Shi'ite south as the Americans are in the Sunni Triangle. An opinion poll conducted shortly before the Dec 15 elections showed that Basrans are overwhelmingly hostile toward the British. So how come the British suffer so few casualties, as compared to the Americans? That's mainly because, unlike the Sunni insurgents who attack the Americans in and around Baghdad, the Shi'ite militias in the south already wield political power - they may resent the British presence, but it doesn't stop them from...